The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton provides expert insights on current events in the federal community. Read more interviews to keep up with daily news and analysis that affect the federal workforce. Reach out to Terry and the Federal Drive producers with feedback and story ideas at [email protected].
Terry Gerton This is a really important report from GAO. You note that about 26 million people in the United States have limited English proficiency, and that means they face additional risks during severe weather outbreaks, because our warnings tend to be English-only. As you dug into this issue, what were you really trying to understand about the federal government’s current alert system?
Cardell Johnson When doing this work, we really were trying to first, just get a broad understanding of how do emergency alerts actually reach the public? And then we wanted to dive a bit deeper into that and say, OK, we understand how this gets out broadly, but what about those communities who don’t speak or understand much English? And so in doing the work, we really needed to understand the different emergency alerting systems. I think it was also important in doing this work to hear from communities or groups that represent the communities about some of the challenges with getting alerts and responding.
Terry Gerton And you went to several communities. What surprised you most about their responses here?
Cardell Johnson This is a topic that is definitely a public safety concern. And whenever you’re talking about public safety, you really expect people to perk up and sort of really pay attention and to be very keen on it. But this is the topic here because most of the information that’s coming out from the alerting system, it comes from the government. And what we heard from various communities that we talked to is that sometimes folks question whether or not they can trust that information that comes from the government. And so you’re hearing that, right? And you’re like, “oh, no, this is something that actually can save your life, so yes, you should trust it.” But I think what that means for the federal government — and I would say this for any level of government — is really important that we liaise with communities, that we do that outreach to sort of bridge that gap, so that people do understand and trust what we’re putting out so that it can save lives.
Terry Gerton As you speak about these communities, we often think about providing the warnings in Spanish, for example, in addition to English, but there are so many other language groups that are out there. Would they find this critical information more trustworthy if it came to them in their own language?
Cardell Johnson Absolutely. That’s what we heard from a lot of different organizations that represent the different groups or communities — that if the information came to them in their native dialect, that it would be more believable and they would be willing to act.
Terry Gerton It seems kind of like a no-brainer, but yet in your analysis, you found all kinds of reasons why that doesn’t happen. Talk to us about what some of those are.
Cardell Johnson Here, you’ve got issues. I would sell it as three things. So there’s a systems issue, there’s a staffing issue and there’s a speed issue. With systems, simply put, a lot of the emergency alerting systems just weren’t built to support multiple languages. These systems are quite old, and so they need to be modernized. On a staffing issues, a challenge with being able to provide these alerts in multiple languages is that many agencies, whether it’s at the federal level or even local municipalities, which can also take steps if they need to to translate alerts, they don’t have the staff or maybe the budget to be able to translate quickly. Then the speed issue here, challenge, is that it’s really important to do this fast and accurately because a delayed alert can be just as dangerous as getting no alert. So those are the challenges with this.
Terry Gerton So any one of those would be a very challenging obstacle for federal bureaucracy to deal with. What happens when you put all three of them together?
Cardell Johnson Oh, it makes it extra challenging for folks to deal with.
Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Cardell Johnson. He’s director of natural resources and environment at GAO. I’m suspecting that many of our localities are farther along in their modernization than the federal government. School systems have to put out notices in all kinds of different languages, depending on what they deal with. But this seems like a problem that is tailor-made for an AI solution. If Google Translate can handle hundreds of different languages, why can’t the National Weather Service?
Cardell Johnson Well, AI is very promising, but it does need some guardrails. And so you can’t just, you know, use AI. You’ve got to have a plan. You’ve got to have quality checks. Because here is one of the things: We were talking with the local emergency management agency, and one of points that they made to us is that, hey, even in Spanish, there are variations of Spanish being spoken. You can have a community where, yes, they all speak Spanish, but if they are coming from multiple different countries where there’s a variation in how you might say the phrase, that could also throw people off. Sometimes with AI, it doesn’t recognize those variations. Work needs to be done to train the AI models. And that really takes time. You also need the experts, who are experts in that dialect, to be part of that in helping train these systems. The encouraging thing though, is that the National Weather Service does have an AI translation project. I think that the challenge that it faces there is really related to planning, but then also all of the workforce issues that are challenging much of the federal government right now.
Terry Gerton So how is the National Weather Service doing in actually moving forward on that plan? Do they have a timeline in which they’d like to deploy this new approach?
Cardell Johnson That is what we are encouraging through our recommendation — that they need to do some additional planning, to have specific metrics to let them know they’re successful. What’s the timeline? Again, we’re talking about emergency alerts, which are really important to make sure that we’re saving lives.
Terry Gerton As you did the report, you highlighted several friction points around this project. Funding uncertainty, limits in wireless carrier capacity, broader policy headwinds around language access. How are all of these together influencing how the National Weather Service is approaching the rollout?
Cardell Johnson What it’s meaning is that it really has to be a well-coordinated approach. I think one of the challenges here is that multiple agencies are involved in this, so it is not just the National Weather Service. If we think about it, if I break this down, there’s really three key agencies that are involved in this. You’ve got the National Weather Service. They are the weather experts. They’re the ones that track storms and weather patterns. And then based on their analysis of that, they issue the official warnings, like tornadoes or flash floods, and that triggers emergency alerts. But then you’ve got the FCC here, and think of them as the rules and the standards agency. They have to set the requirements for how alerts must work across phones and TVs and radios. And if that wasn’t enough, you’ve got FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency. Their role is like a national coordinator and operator, and what they do is they help run emergency management infrastructure so that your state, federal, tribal, local agencies can be able to send out those alerts. So when you want to modernize a system, which also includes multiple dialects to send these alerts out, that’s a lot of different coordination that you have to do. That takes time and everyone has to be on the same page.
Terry Gerton I really appreciate you walking us through that level of complexity, because it’s one thing to say, I have Google Translate, why can’t you solve this problem, and entirely another to think about deploying it through the federal bureaucracy. But nonetheless, we don’t want extreme weather to be a life-or-death situation for most people. So within your recommendations, what does GAO suggest ought to be the priority of effort in the next year to help address this critical shortfall?
Cardell Johnson Well, this is where you’ve really got to lean into what we’re doing with AI. You’ve really got to prioritize. AI has a lot of strong possibilities to help here, but you’ve got to prioritize the investments that go into that to be able to utilize that service. Then also, you’ve got to make sure that you have that funding available, because AI can’t do it on its own. It has to be unique — all the different expertise, particularly of folks that have expertise in the language to make that is translating correctly. Those are the things that that level of planning and coordination for AI itself is very much needed.
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